Nowadays, the Internet is widely used to transfer applications to users through browsers. The Internet also is used for e-commerce in which individual customers and businesses use the Web to purchase various goods and services. In fact, some companies offer goods and services solely on the Web while others use the Web to extend their reach.
With respect to these commercial activities and others, businesses and content providers employ servers to process requests from different users. Various architectures are employed in handling these requests. Often, distributed architectures in which a set of servers in a cluster (“server farm”) are used to handle requests. In such a server farm architecture, the set of servers appears to a user as a single server. A load-balancing mechanism may be used to determine which server within the server farm will be used to handle various requests directed to the server farm.
Configuring and maintaining the various servers within a server farm has historically been a challenge. This challenge is exacerbated as the number of servers employed in a given server farm increases in number and as more features, implemented for the applications running on the server farm, are added to the server farm as customized operations (“jobs”). For example, administrators of a server farm often want to run timed jobs on servers in the server farm. Such a job may be a one-time job that only runs once by any of the servers in the server farm. Such a job can also be a recurring job that executed at a definable interval, during a certain time period in the hour, day, week, month, or year. Usually, such jobs may be defined by developers enhancing applications running on the server farm, and submitted to the server farm by authorized personnel (“administrator”) of the server farm. Therefore, it is desirable to provide a system and method that can easily integrate jobs submitted by administrators into the server farm. It is also desirable that the jobs can be automatically deployed to proper servers in the server farm and executed in a consistent manner.